IN-DEPTH FEATURESAll in the Family — Three Jewish Genealogists
Discuss the Recent Upsurge of Interest in Searching for
Jewish Roots

by S. Fried

Introduction: Sons of Kings?

Were all the eligible participants in the gathering that is
being planned in Israel in the not-too-distant future to
actually attend, no hall would be large enough to hold them.
Although it is to be a gathering of one family's members,
there's no way that they all know each other, or ever will
know each other. What they have in common is a feeling of
importance — nobility in fact, because this conference
is for people who have a family tradition of descent from
Dovid Hamelech. It's interesting to note that although only
one of Dovid's many sons inherited his crown, for some reason
Dovid, not Shlomo Hamelech, is always claimed as the
ancestor.

The chances of anyone producing a complete record of descent
from Dovid Hamelech and laying claim to his throne are very
slim indeed. To qualify for admission to the conference, a
record going back a thousand years to a known ancestor who
was reputed in his day to have been descended from Dovid will
suffice.

The real question is though, how does each descendant conduct
himself today? Is he also a spiritual heir or is his only
connection some DNA? Would his illustrious ancestor view him
with pride as a bearer of his heritage or would he sadly
exclaim, "See what the latter generations have done to our
spiritual riches!"

The gathering is taking place on the initiative of a well-
known lady philanthropist, who has her own reasons for what
she is doing. Her goals are neither nostalgia nor history
— there seems to be a fairly obvious political end to
holding the conference. If it actually takes place, it's
clear that there will be many participants; it can be
expected to have a profound effect upon them at least.

Chaim Friedman is the conference's genealogical advisor and
this means that there's a good chance that a fair proportion
of the participants will possess established traditions of
illustrious ancestry. A professional genealogist who takes
his work seriously, Chaim Friedman is sure to examine every
claim thoroughly.

Roots and Responsibility

In the academic world, genealogy has not yet become a
separate discipline — no university has a Department of
Genealogy, much less of Jewish Genealogy. Yet several serious
researchers — whose standard of scholarship equals that
of other historical researchers, are working to have their
subject recognized.

Around the world, in gentile society, recent decades have
seen searching for roots or building a family tree become
increasingly fashionable. It's easy to understand the
interest that the pastime holds for an immigrant society like
America. None of the results of their researches impose any
obligations on Americans — certainly not to return to
the countries that their ancestors left behind.

No few Jews have also been infected by the craze and many,
mostly in North America and Israel, have also tried their
hand at piecing together a family tree.

By contrast, preserving a record of one's family's lineage is
an old-established custom among Jews. Among the gentiles this
was only done by the nobility (who kept both their own
records and those of their thoroughbred dogs and horses) in
order to document their title to property and privilege. We
Yidden however, are all of noble descent and must
preserve the purity of our lineage. How can one complete a
shidduch without knowing about the other side's
yichus? Were it not for all the pogroms, expulsions
and wanderings that our ancestors underwent, every Jew would
possess a complete record of his own lineage. One consequence
of our long and bitter history is that very few families
possess such records.

"For us as Yidden" says Chaim Friedman, "yichus
means responsibility rather than honor. Family connections
are important when they have some spiritual dimension. To be
descended from a godol is a responsibility. This is
why I concentrate on rabbinical families."

Chaim Friedman himself is an eighth generation descendant of
the Vilna Gaon — a claim based on solid documentation.
It is no surprise to find out that he has made a thorough
study of all the Gaon's descendants, publishing his findings
in a thick volume entitled Anfei Eliyahu.

Links with the Past

Chaim Guesli, Director of the Computerized Information Bank
at Israel's Diaspora Museum, is witness to the recent growth
of interest in searching for roots.

"A week ago," he says, "we had a visitor from Bulgaria, a man
in his forties. [Bulgarian Jews are virtually all estranged
from Judaism.] He was looking for material on his family's
origins and discovered that his grandfather had been
oleh to Eretz Yisroel from Bulgaria. He
suddenly made the connection — Grandfather settled in
the Holy Land because that's where his own ancestors lived.
My forefathers lived here! That's just one step away from
investigating Jewish history and identifying with it.

"A generation ago, there were those who said, `I'm an
Israeli!' dissociating themselves from Jewish history, as it
were. The moment someone starts taking an interest in his
family's history though, he encounters the world of
tradition, because earlier generations all observed the
mitzvos and were faithful to tradition. Just seeing pictures
of ancestors three or four generations ago is enough to
establish a positive, emotional bond."

Guesli adds that the popular Heritage trips to Eastern Europe
have the same effect. Israelis tour Eastern Europe, Morocco,
Tunis and Egypt. Seeing the places where Jewish communities
used to exist transforms their outlook. They begin to see
themselves as part of the Jewish nation.

The Diaspora Museum encourages students to put together
family trees, in accordance with the Ministry of Education's
Roots Program. This program is actually the antithesis of the
one-time Zionist goal of severing all connection with the
past. Building a family tree stimulates contact between
family members of differing generations that did not usually
take place beforehand. Children ask parents, grandparents and
other relatives questions about the past and the subsequent
discussions forge new emotional bonds. Suddenly a child
learns about a grandfather's past life and about past events;
he absorbs history without being aware of it. The program
also encourages investigating any special family traditions,
or objects that have a story behind them. The conclusions to
which these contacts lead can surface years later.

New Attitudes

Dr. Yosef Lamdan recently founded the International Institute
for Jewish Genealogy, in Yerushalayim. Dr. Lamdan's doctorate
is in history and he arrived at the subject as a result of
his work in Israel's Foreign Service. He points out the moral
dynamics of the growing involvement in Jewish genealogy. "The
interest in [discovering one's] roots has been growing
steadily among North American Jewry over the past twenty
years. This is partly because it has become fashionable and
thanks to [the opportunities provided by] affluence and the
freedom from worrying about one's daily bread. Mainly though,
it is owing to the major public debate that has been taking
place about continuity (since population surveys show very
high percentages of intermarriage). Suddenly, Jews realize
that in order to ensure their continuity they must establish
some link with their past and their roots — Past for
the Sake of Future — in order to remain Jewish."

In Israel, Dr. Lamdan says, for years the Zionists adopted a
deliberate policy of turning their backs on the Diaspora,
severing any links to their roots and establishing a
completely new reality. Today this attitude is being
reevaluated. People understand that the Diaspora is part of
us and that we cannot cut ourselves off from Judaism. There
are Jews living in the Diaspora even today and all of us
belong to the same nation. This attitude is present, says Dr.
Lamdan, even if it is not articulated quite in those
words.

Getting Started

It took Chaim Friedman thirty years to put the Gaon's family
tree together. He's been investigating his own family's
history for forty-five years at least, ever since he was a
youngster taking an interest in whatever his grandmother
could tell him about the family. The starting point for his
researches on the Gaon's family was a book published seventy
years ago by Eliezer Rivlin wherein he discovered his own
family's relationship to the Gaon.

Back then Rivlin found two-hundred-and-fifty descendants of
the Gaon. Friedman had found twenty thousand — and
another ten thousand have come to light since the publication
of his book. Innumerable families claim descent from the Gaon
and his relatives — that is, they claim to be
descendants of the Gaon's father. Here is a partial, random
list of such families: Scharansky, Ben Ami, Zohnstein, Wolpe,
Sternbuch, Fried, Friedman, Schatz, Shach, Carmel, Romm,
Cohen Epstein, Krechemer and many more.

Friedman's research encompassed numerous seforim,
archives, introductions to rabbinical works and other
resources. A tremendous amount of new material has become
available in recent years, since the fall of the Iron Curtain
and the opening of archives across Eastern Europe to the
public, coupled with the advances in information technology.
Advanced computer techniques enabled Friedman to achieve a
high level of consistency and accuracy in his book.

Chaim Guesli: "Anyone can put a family tree together that
goes back to the middle of the nineteenth century at least,
that is, five or six generations at least. Information can be
gathered from older family members. This stage alone can
yield a list of between seventy and a hundred relatives. Then
one can look further afield and search for records of the
family's lineage."

Such records are more common among Sephardi families, Guesli
says, because of the phenomenon of the [Spanish]
Conversos who wanted to have documented proof of their
Jewish descent.

The Diaspora Museum has approximately seven thousand family
trees, containing two million names altogether. Such trees
are submitted in complete form by the families; they were not
put together by museum staff. This is the form in which
amateur researchers like to preserve their own private
histories. Jews from abroad attach special importance to
having these records kept in Israel.

Then there are the people who come searching for their family
roots. Nobody is happier than they are when they find a ready-
made family tree. The Diaspora Museum's information bank can
be accessed from afar, or by applying by mail or by phone
call, for just a nominal fee.

Only the Diaspora Museum's family tree archive is so easily
accessed. A much larger but much harder to use information
bank can be accessed from the Genealogical Society's Website.
The Society for Jewish Genealogy provides advice on building
a family tree and obtaining information about one's family
(see box).

Looking Forward

Dr. Lamdan hopes to establish Jewish genealogy as an academic
discipline. To this end he recently founded, with funding
from abroad, the International Institute for Jewish
Genealogy, which is currently housed in the National Library
in Jerusalem, as one of its research institutes. The
institute has two principal aims: first, research and
teaching of Jewish genealogy and second, turning genealogy
into a recognized branch of Jewish Studies. He is aware that
there is still a very long way to go before that happens and
concedes that in the meantime, it remains something of a
hobby.

The Institute is a recognized fellowship and has an
international board composed of well-known Jewish
genealogists. Among its goals is the establishment of contact
with large stores of information, such as Yad Vashem which
has huge collections primarily of recent generations. In the
near future the Institute plans to hold a closed, private
international symposium on a professional level to chart its
activities and methods of operation.

The Institute has already launched a monumental project: the
indexing of the huge amount of material relating to Jewish
genealogy that was collected by Paul Yaakobi, who served as
legal advisor to the Keren Kayemet Leyisrael. Yaakobi worked
for fifty years on amassing vast amounts of material about
Jewish families — principally Ashkenazi rabbinical
families. He also authored approximately four hundred
pamphlets and left a collection of twelve thousand books on
the subject. But without an index the material is virtually
unusable.

Another of the institute's projects in indexing is the
archives that have recently come to light in Eastern Europe.
Project JRI Jewish Indexing, has recently been launched in
Poland, where records exist going back many generations.
Although the huge task of copying the documents is underway,
without an orderly and methodical index the material is hard
to access. There are also huge archives in St. Petersburg,
Kiev, Grodno and other places. The YIVO institute in New York
also has a large archive.

So, if you still haven't managed to find out who your great-
great-grandfather's grandfather was, don't lose hope. You
might still do it before you become a great-grandfather
yourself!

Genealogy: Micro, Macro and DNA

What is the difference between genealogy and history?

Chaim Friedman refers to the first as the "micro" and the
second as the "macro." He explains that genealogy focuses on
the individual and views the past through his ancestry.
History, on the other hand, takes a broad, all-encompassing
view of events, of communities, institutions, wars etc.,
without descending to a personal level.

Dr. Lamdan on the other hand, argues that genealogy —
as a scientific study, rather than a hobby — is more
than micro and deals with broader issues than a single
individual's family tree. "Genealogists aim to put together
family trees that merge with one another," he says, "in
particular those of rabbinical families. When researching
families, one sees how rabbinical families married into each
other. Ultimately, we may arrive at the family tree of the
entire Jewish people. Lineage has always been very important
to Jews; we are interested in pursuing this on a very broad
scale.

"This type of research," adds Dr. Lamdan, "enables us to
investigate where these rabbonim came from and how they
attained their positions in the various communities. What
became of their offspring? Did they follow their ancestral
traditions or did they take a different path? There are also
subtopics such as the development of first names and family
names.

"From our point of view," says Dr. Lamdan, "Jewish genealogy
is one more lens through which Jewish history can be viewed
and analyzed. Alongside economic, political and social
history we now have genealogical history. It's a very special
kind of history. It reflects history from a human, personal
angle."

Other scholars have been studying the genome, that is, the
Jewish nation's physical genes. In recent years, several
studies have been made in an attempt to trace Jewish history
through DNA. The leading researcher in this field is
Professor Karl Skorecki, a researcher at the University of
Toronto, Director of the Rappaport Research Institute and
also Director of Nephrology at the Haifa Technion's Rambam
Medical center. Dr. Skorecki examined the DNA of families of
cohanim and, together with other scientists, isolated
a "genetic signature," a distinct grouping of DNA markers,
that appear in cohanim. The markers were found in 98.5
percent of the 188 people who identified themselves as
cohanim who participated in the initial study, while
in others the markers were much less common. Ashkenazi,
Sephardi and Yemenite cohanim all have the markers,
which shows, according to the researchers, that cohen status
was carefully preserved.

Furthermore, the results of this and further tests indicate
that all cohanim share a common ancestor who lived a
hundred and six generations ago, i.e. approximately 3100
years ago, in a range of years into which the lifetime of
Aharon Hacohen fits comfortably.

Dr. Doron Behar, one of Prof. Skorecki's pupils, also
conducted genetic studies and found that all of Ashkenazi
Jewry are descended from four "matriarchs" — that is
four women — who lived during the last 1300 years in
Europe. These individuals did not necessarily live at the
same time or in the same place but the Ashkenazi Jews are
their descendants.

We cannot comment on the relevance of these results to us. At
the moment, there are no known halachic consequences of any
of these findings. They are just interesting in
themselves.

Further research is to examine the question of whether the
ancient Hebrews were dark-skinned or light and what this
might prove.

Genealogy DIY

The Jewish Genealogical Society provides a list of twelve
points to guide those interested in researching their own
family histories.

One: Consult family members. Talk to them. Ask them
questions. Record the older family members speaking. Don't
forget in-laws and other relations by marriage. Look for
family archival material such as pictures and letters. You
will need to know:

i) your family's present and past name(s), its source and
different ways of spelling it;

ii) your family's place of origin and any different names by
which it might have been known;

iii) the approximate year that the family emigrated to the
USA, Eretz Yisroel or elsewhere, the name of the
vessel and its port of dock if available.

Two: Check National Insurance documents for dates of
deaths; find the records of the cemeteries.

Three: Check gravestones. Most of them carry some
family details. Photograph the inscriptions several times, to
ensure you obtain a clear copy.

Four: Check population registers and censuses. You can
find details about your ancestor's occupations, neighbors and
more.

Five: Check old municipal guides. They can be found in
libraries.

Six: Check immigration records. Fifty five million
immigrants arrived in the United States between 1820-1990,
most of them from Eastern Europe. There was also large-scale
immigration to Eretz Yisroel at the beginning of the
second half of the twentieth century.

Seven: Check atlases and geographical guides in order
to corroborate sources of places where people lived.

Eight: Get acquainted with local records, such as
births, deaths, wills and the land register.

Twelve: Last, a word of warning: you can become
addicted! Try to get your nose out of old documents and away
from computer resources from time to time. There are plenty
of other things to do besides tracing your ancestors, of
blessed memory!

What's in a Name?

Did you ever imagine that there's any connection between the
names Resnick, Metzger, Shechter, Fleischer and Shochet?

Well, Resnick is Slovene for butcher. Shechter and Shochet
are Yiddish and Russian derivations of the Hebrew
shochet (the first of which should therefore really be
spelt in Hebrew with a ches instead of the usual
chof), while in French the name is Boucher and in
German, Fleischer, Fleischmann or Metzger. For some reason,
no Jew has adopted the English equivalent, butcher, as a
surname.

Many books — some more scholarly and some less so
— have been written about the meaning and different
renditions of various surnames. Only the Diaspora Museum has
an organized collection of family names with their sources,
meanings, translations into other languages and examples of
well-known Jews who bore them.

Chaim Guesli is Director of the Diaspora Museum's
Computerized Information Bank. "For over twenty years we've
had researchers, many of them volunteers, investigating
family names. Unlike family trees, which anyone can put
together, finding the meaning of a name requires a lot of
background information," Guesli says. As a result, their
information is as authoritative as can be.

The introduction that the museum provides to its collection
of family names contains all that is known about the topic.
Here is a summary of the general information.

The first known instances of Jews taking family names are
found in tenth century France, Spain, Italy and North Africa.
In Central and Eastern Europe, surnames were used primarily
by the upper classes. Most Jewish families only adopted
surnames in the eighteenth century, either at the behest of
the authorities for the population register, army service or
taxation, or in order to maintain connection between family
members living far away from one another.

The main distinction is made between names that Jews gave
themselves and names that they were given by their
environment or the authorities. Names are arranged into
types, such as names of town or region of origin (e.g.
Berlin, Mainzer — German cities), occupation (e.g.
Shuster, Portnoy — Yiddish for shoemaker and Russian
for tailor, respectively), physical description (e.g. Roth,
Weiss, Klein — Yiddish for red, white and little), or
special status (e.g. Cohen, Levi). However, even after great
effort it is not always possible to discover the meaning of
every name.

In an article in the journal Etmol, Chanan Rappaport
discusses the origins of his family name, which has some
derivatives, such as Rapport, Rafa and others. The first
possible explanation is that the name originated with Spanish
or Portuguese exiles as the result of a marriage between the
distinguished Rafa family from Spain and the Porto family
from the town of Porto in Portugal.

Another possibility is that the name derives from the title
"Rav [of the town] of Oporto," the beis of
Rav having been lost, possibly in the troubles of the
exile.

More recent ideas are that the Rappaports are one hundred
percent Ashkenazi, their ancestors having hailed from the
town of Rafa, which is near Regensburg in Germany. When the
Jews of Regensburg were expelled in 1420 the family moved to
Mainz, where they were still known as Rafa. When they were
expelled from Mainz they moved to Italy, with one of the
branches settling in Porto (this time in Italy, not Portugal)
where he became rov. In order to distinguish him from
another Rafa who was also a rov he was known as "Rafa
from Porto."

Others claim that the name Rafa comes from the German word
for raven, the proof being that several members of the family
referred to themselves as being "from the ravens" and
included a picture of a raven on their family emblem. The
raven's relevance to Jews is that it symbolizes constant
wandering, like the raven that Noach sent after the flood who
found nowhere to rest.

One member of the family wrote his name on his family emblem
together with a picture of a raven: Avraham Menachem bar
Yaakov Hacohen Rafa del MiPorto. Or, it could be that the
name derives from the town of Portobofola, where members of
the Rafa family lived.

The family later spread across Europe, North Africa and Eretz
Yisroel. If a family gathering is ever held, the number of
ideas for explaining the name will probably be close to the
number of participants.

Most explanations of family names are far simpler. It is
interesting to follow different variations of the same names.
Have you heard of the name Pekta (accented on the first
syllable)? It has a distinctly Hungarian ring; indeed, a
Pekta family is known to have lived in Budapest in 1381. They
might have had particularly black hair or dark complexions
because the name means black.

Interestingly, black is a name that many Jewish families in
different countries have adopted. Possibly it was originally
intended as a slur, or to ward off ayin hora, or it
might have been conferred upon individuals whose skin or hair
coloring stood out from the fairness of the surrounding
population. The name Schwartz occurs in Strasbourg (on the
border between France and Germany) in 1387 and in Budapest in
1509, while there was a Schwartzschild family in Frankfurt in
1560. Schild means shield, which was a symbol of the
nobility. In French this name became Sarceil and the German
Schwartzshtein became Chastin. At any rate, Pekta in
Hungarian, Schwartzmann in German, Black in English and
Shachor in Hebrew, all have the same meaning.

What is the meaning of your family's name? If you're
interested in knowing, you can try and discover it by writing
to the Bank of Names at the Diaspora Museum, enclosing twenty-
five shekels or, for seven shekels (not including the
museum's entrance fee) you can go there and look it up
yourself.